Weekly participation

This week I thought I would go off the deep end and suggest the use of Itunes as a technology resource in Social Studies classrooms. The reason this would be a good idea is because it would allow students to find songs that they find applicable to various subjects of study in history such as Napoleon and the song (falling down but rising up again.) Or the Oliver Cromwell song. Music can be very powerful especially for teens who always connect with music. Showing them songs and allowing them to pick songs out that connect to the subject currently being studied is a great tool as long as it is not overused. You can also use these songs in tests.

Final Project Proposal

World Civilization

Standard 4 Objective 1 :Assess the importance of intellectual and cultural change on early modern society. (Art, Literature, Architecture, and humanities..)

I have decided to do a mix between a virtual tour of various sites using Google maps and videos and then add some pictures for statues and art that can be found using Google maps. It is important that students be able to see the differences in arts and architecture so that they can more easily compare and contrast the differences.

participation (week ending 11/15)

Today I want to share a website that I came across as a freshman in college. The website is Purdue OWL (online writing lab.) http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/677/01/  Specifically on this website there is a section for 7-12 graders. It gives a ton of resources on teaching students how to write well. It gives examples of the writing process and many other helpful hints. As a history teacher, I know the importance of teaching kids to write well and this is a great resource to help teachers manage just that.

I-Safe program for internet Safety

This week I decided to do the alternative activity for internet safety. Yes, that means that I actually listened to about 5 hrs of information and most of it was worth it. I feel like that I have mostly known about this stuff as my middle school and high school have been diligent in teaching about internet safety but it was a great review.  I definitely would recommend this site to parents and students to help them understand what really is out there.  One interesting note, I was talking to someone about the information given during the lessons and the person brought up an interesting point. They asked how hiding your real name, picture and other things would really help when the predators are so tech savvy these days that they can just find you anyway. I thought about it for a minute and then said that when I went to London this summer I was told that the best way to avoid being pickpocketed was to blend in. Yes there is a chance that you may still have issues online or may get pickpocketed but the chances are much lower. Predators always want to go for the easy prey, it is human nature. So, by blending in you are less likely to come to their attention. Yes this means that others must take the fall but at least you are trying to help as many as possible blend in.

Participation for 2-8 Nov

I was meeting with a group the other day about a geography project when we decided that it would be a great idea to use google doc to make our powerpoint so that we wouldn't have to meet so often. Now i know we have gone over google docs some in lecture but I feel that no one ever really pays attention to using actual powerpoint on google doc. By using this tool people can add to just one powerpoint without having to combine many of them. it can be done over long distances (I worked on one while on the isle of man this summer while others in my group were in England and the United States) I feel like we should suggest using this with other classes as a multi-class group project. Each Class can be assigned a part in the powerpoint and then the classes can help put it together.

My informational movie

This is the video that I did for the project. It almost completely follows my storyboard that I submitted last week. It was rather interesting making this video. I feel that making a video can be rather time consuming and I wouldn't do this very often.

participation for week 10/24-11/1

I read a very interesting article this week on CNN. The article was about a mexican/american who had served in WWII as a medic and who ended up being put in a slave camp in Germany. This guy just recently donated his diary to the Holocaust museum and it got me thinking that there are some great resources that you can find on museum websites to help bring media and primary information into the classroom. In fact on the American holocaust museum website there is a section that is just for educators to help them teach their kids in the classroom. The link for this is http://www.ushmm.org/education/foreducators/  There are many other museum websites that have similar links. This is great for not only history teachers but also science teachers such as a link at the air and space museum in the smithsonian.